Styria is the second largest state of Austria, in the south eastern part of the country. It is famous for its beautiful mountains, its wines and some decent yodelling 🙂

It is also home to green tech industries, in fact “Styria is home to more than 150 clean technology companies … [whose] revenue totals €2.7 billion. This equals to 8 percent of the Gross Regional Product (GRP), and is one of the highest concentrations of leading clean technology companies in Europe.” (Wikipedia)

Above is a Sankey diagram depicting the energy balance at Obersteirische Molkerei Knittelfeld (Upper-Styrian dairy in Knittelfeld). Flows are in MWh per year. The main energy requirement is steam from natural gas: Whey drying and steam for milk pre-heating are the largest consumers of process heat. Read more detail on the dairy production here.

Published on the ‘The Efficient Appliances Blog’ is Pakistan’s First Energy Flow Diagram by Nida Rizwan Farid. The Sankey diagram is a piece of work for Pakistan’s Integrated Energy Plan and covers energy data for 2012/2013.

A more detailed explanation of the energy situation is given on this page. The author observes that “[o]ut of the 40.2 MTOE of final energy that trickles down the consumers, 72.7% of it is lost by the usage of inefficient appliances, motor vehicles and industrial processes. Only 10.96 MTOE of useful energy is received.”

The energy balance of the German city of Stuttgart has been mapped as a Sankey diagram.

This was part of the project ‘SEE Stuttgart’ (City with Energy Efficiency / “Stadt mit Energie-Effizienz”) and has been developed by Fraunhofer IBP research institute.

A vertical layout was chosen. Absolute energy flow quantities are not shown in this version of the diagram, but are available in the underlying study. In 2010 primary energy consumption in Stuttgart was 20.300 GWh.

The diagram is used to promote a better understanding of the consuming sectors in the city, and the types of energy used. The SEE project aims to reduce Stuttgart’s energy consumption by 20% in 10 years and to transition to non-fossil fuels.

Here is the energy flow Sankey diagram (Balance Energetico Nacional) for Costa Rica for the year 2010.

In contrast to the situation in Guatemala, the dominating fuel is petroleum. The other two important feeds are from hydro and geothermal. Wood is used as heat source in private homes (17,746 TJ), and, with about the same amount, biowaste (residuos vegetales) constitutes an energy source for industry (17,607 TJ).

Flows are in TJ. The diagram is provided by the Ministry for Environment, Energy and Telecommunications.

In regard to design the diagram has many issues: Apparently it was created using a drawing tool that supports primarily horizontal and vertical arrows and Bezier curves. But the diagram loses a lot with branching and joining of arrows almost non-existent.

Flows are more or less to scale. The unit is not shown in the diagram itself, but explained in the text (kilo barriles equivalentes de petróleo, KBEP = kilo tonnes of oil equivalent, ktoe). Data is from national statistics published by the Energy and Mining Ministry.

The content of the energy balance diagram is quite interesting, especially if you compare it to similar diagrams of other countries or the world average.
Wood is the most important energy in Costa Rica (green arrow ‘Leña’, 37.251 ktoe in 2011). Bagasse from sugar cane (dark green arrow ‘bagazo de caña’, 8.696 ktoe in 2011) is used for almost half of the electricity generation. Petroleum and derivates (dark pink arrow, 24.903 ktoe in 2011) however do play an important role for vehicles (transportation).

It has the typical structure of a national energy flow Sankey diagram as I have shown here on the blog many times. Flows are in terajoule (TJ) and have a general left-to-right orientation. On the left are the different energy carriers (primary energy), conversion in the middle section, consuming sectors on the right. Losses branch out to the bottom.

Unfortunately the streams are not to scale in this Sankey diagram. Compare for example the 80.149 TJ energy from “leña” (wood) in green to the 515.929 TJ of energy embodied in gas (sand color) right above. The gas arrow should be approximately 6 times wider – still it is drawn thinner. Even worse the situation for losses in gas processing where 241.007 TJ are “no aprovechada” while 274.922 TJ pass through gas processing (“planta de gas”). Roughly half of the energy embodied in gas is not used, but it looks as if that arrow branching out to the bottom represents some 10 to 15% of the total flow only. Many other examples of wrong arrow magnitudes can be found.

So, some very general basics of Sankey diagrams are ignored here. Readers should check the flow quantities carefully, and not rely on the perceived quantities represented by the arrows.